Our complete guide to Siri explains how to use Siri, details all the Siri features and commands (including the new questions introduced in iOS 8.3 and coming in iOS 8.4 and iOS 9) and helps you get more out of Siri on your iPhone or iPad.
“Hey Siri, give us a hint”
Siri is, of course, a marvel of modern technology. But it's also one of those things that a lot of us don't use as much as we could or should. So a couple of Macworld editors, particularly Senior Editor Dan Frakes, put together the following list of 16 things we think everybody should know how to do using Siri.
The personal computer has endured for more than 30 years. We understand it. It's familiar. But digital assistants--the new breed of smartphone data butlers designed to make our lives simpler--have yet to climb out of their cribs.
Our residences are long overdue for a technological makeover. More and more electronics have, over the years, found their way into houses and apartments: Everything from thermostats to ovens and washing machines are, for all intents and purposes, run by small computers. To boot, many dwellings are now completely covered by wireless networks that can carry very significant amounts of data, without requiring expensive wiring.
In early October, CNN revealed that veteran voice actor, Susan Bennett, was the voice behind Siri until Apple changed it in iOS 7. Her utterances, she revealed in an interview, were being used by the tech giant (and its likely voice synthesis partner Nuance) to generate the digital assistant's own words.
Siri is, by far, my favorite recent addition to iOS. In an age when electronic devices keep getting smaller, faster, and thinner, the humble keyboard feels increasingly like a relic of a bygone era - an era when computers were designed to occupy entire rooms instead of the palm of a hand.
Perhaps you are already an iOS master. Or maybe you consider yourself more of a novice. Either way, we feel confident that at least some of the tips and tricks for iOS 6 that we present below will be new to you. What's more, we hope you love them--and benefit from them--as much as we do.
If we can predict just one thing for Apple in 2013, it's this: The company will continue to release products. But we're going to predict more than one thing (because we're crazy like that): Apple won't close down the business and give its money back to its shareholders, and it won't stop developing its major product lines. Here's how we think that development could go this year.
It's widely accepted in the technology industry that Apple is working on a smart, internet-connected TV device. But what do we really know about the 'iTV' so far? There's been a lot of speculation flying around about an Apple TV set for several years, and many times it has been reported that Apple has been on the brink of an announcement - only for our hopes to be dashed at the last minute.
Since the advent of the first modern smartphone--arguably the original Apple iPhone in 2007--the power of these mobile computing devices that also happen to make phone calls has advanced by leaps and bounds.
The iPhone 4S hit Australian stores today and one of the most hotly anticipated features is Siri voice control: described by Apple as a voice assistant that lets you talk to perform tasks by talking to your iPhone. How well does it handle our Aussie accent?
